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These funds have very low average volume, but the yields stand to be pretty good once they've built some track record; all three are very new.

Our firm uses the
Powershares Emerging Market Sovereign Debt Portfolio(PCY), which obviously owns only sovereigns, and for now there appears to be no meaningful performance difference, but that could change with time.

For equity investing, there are, of course, hundreds of ETFs to choose from.

With portfolios that look vaguely like the Permanent Portfolio (equal portions into four asset classes), there is no reason the equity portion can't be a fully developed equity portfolio that expresses country, sector, size or thematic decisions, and specialized ETFs allow for this type of portfolio construction.

This may not make sense if the equity portion is $10,000, but are there a lot of people who put a $200,000-$300,000 equity allocation, or more, all into one total market fund?

Precious metals are tricky. Gold really is about fear of debasement, but it does work most of the time in the face of true market shocks.

Silver, platinum and palladium have more correlation to the economic cycles and will move up and down with the economy. If there ever is swift and catastrophic debasement, then maybe those three metals will turn out to be great holds in Faber's context, but for now they seem better suited to play the economic cycle.